Greetings! We just want to inform you all that OpenMW version 0.45 is finally in RC phase, which means it will soon™ be released to you all.

One important thing, just so you don’t get too excited just yet: neither shadows nor recastnavigation (better AI pathfinding, basically) will be included in the release, even though we all hoped so before. Don’t get too sad though, because recastnavigation is actually merged in master. This means that you can try it out already today in the latest nightlies! The implementation of shadows is not merged yet however, and it is very hard to say exactly when it will get merged, but probably quite soon™. Some bugs take longer time than you might expect before they are solved.

So why were recastnavigation not included in 0.45 then? Basically, it is such a huge update that we need to test it thoroughly before it can get included in a stable release. The alternative would have been to delay the release of 0.45, but that release is so huge already that we still want to get it out for you all. If you do test the implementation of recastnavigation in a nightly, be sure to report any bugs you find!

Otherwise, have a little more patience and you’ll have a new OpenMW version soon.

Just a heads up to let everyone know that there might be some ‘downtime’ as we transition to new infrastructure. This will happen Sunday around 17:00 GMT and hopefully no one will notice a thing. If they do, they will notice something like: https://maintenance.openmw.org

Our longtime comrade, developer and infrastructure admin lgromanowski is stepping down due to time constraints and has asked me (psi29a) and pvdk to take over the reigns of keeping the lights on for OpenMW. Please join us in thanking him for all his hard work keeping things humming along, paying the bills for hosting and donating his time to the project. Thanks Lgro!

We’d hope that this would go without saying, but sometimes it needs to be explicitly said… do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In other words, help us help you. We have a commitment to ourselves to try to help, where we can, to be kind and patient. We ask that also in return. This is our hobby too, our labor of love, be it OpenMW, TES3MP, MWSE… we all want to get along even if we disagree with each other. If we feel that our good will is being abused, then we’ll stop providing help, warn and eventually ban individuals who can’t follow the Golden Rule. This also includes those who troll other projects, for whatever reason.

Version 0.7.0 of TES3MP, a fork of OpenMW that provides players with multiplayer experience, has been pre-released! Full details and download here. But in short, what’s so good about this? Well, for starters, here are a few new features to pique your interest:

– Custom spells, potions and enchantments can now be created through regular gameplay, and their details are sent to other players on a need-to-know basis, preventing unnecessary packet spam.
– Spells cast through items are now synchronized.
– On strike enchantments are now partially synchronized.
– Weather is now fully synchronized, with sudden transitions when teleporting to other areas and gradual transitions when walking across regions.

If you want to experience Morrowind with friends and strangers, come join us!

A lot has happened since 0.44, and 0.45 would be a quite big release already if it were to be released right now.

If you go to our repository and filter out the latest closed issues, you’ll notice something: quite a lot of them were done by Andrei Kortunov (akortunov) and Alexei Dobrohotov (Capostrophic). These guys are working like there’s no tomorrow.

But let’s not forget the other devs. AnyOldName3 is also working his butt off, but with one single, quite big, task; getting shadows back in the engine again. The shadows have been in the work for a long time now, so it proved to be a quite difficult task to do. If you build the shadow branch now, however, you’ll see that there is not much left to do until they are ready to be merged. It is hard to estimate when things in open source projects are done (in a previous news post, there was an estimation that shadows would be done for 0.44… Sorry. As I said, it is hard to estimate stuff!), but with that in mind, it is not unlikely they will be done for the next release, i.e. 0.45. If you wish to support AnyOldName3 with his work on OpenMW and other projects, consider supporting him on patreon!

Elsid is still working with the implementation of navmeshes via Recastnavigation, a feature that was also mentioned in a newspost back in March. A few days ago, he implemented a way to update the navmesh when doors are opened or closed. This means the AI will now finally be able to use doors correctly. Fingers crossed for a merged navmesh feature for 0.45!

Capostrophic and akortunov have both got so many pull requests merged lately that I would just spam this post by mentioning all of them. But let’s sum it up a bit:

0.45 will get improved battle AI (better weapon and magic priorities and better performance for example) thanks to both akortunov and Capostrophic

Kortunov has loads of work in progress pull requests to make animations look better. Most are already merged, and when the last of them are, there will be much rejoicing.

Akortunov implemented proper TTF scaling to the GUI (finally!). We will also get a proper font for the profiler

He is also implementing Lamoot’s icons in the menus in OpenMW-CS, which looks great. Lamoot has worked hard to make more icons and most of the ones needed right now seem to be done.

A crapton of bugfixes

Aesylwinn has returned for some work on the editor. He has been working lately on implementing NPC rendering in the editor, a feature that is more or less ready to be merged at the time of writing. Speaking of the editor, unelsson is working on implementing a land texture selection feature, to be used with his already implemented land texture editing feature.

Wareya, a long time member on the forums, but a not-so-long time developer, is working on improving the movement solver, and once that is done, collisions, like general movement close to walls and the like, will feel much more smooth.

It is also probably time for us to mention the kind of partnership we’ve started with www.modding-openmw.com. This website launched a while ago to suggest good mods for OpenMW, and we’ve partnered with the creator to use the site as a database for mod compatibility. Check it out!

And that’s a summary of what’s been going on since last time you heard from us. Stay tuned for 0.45!

Oh, and as always, we are happily accepting your contributions, be it developing or something else. Just join us on the forums and take part in the discussion or send your merge/pull requests on gitlab or github

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OpenMW is an attempt to reimplement the popular role playing game Morrowind. It aims to be a fully playable, open source implementation of the game. You must own Morrowind to use OpenMW. You can watch short video-faq or read detailed information on our FAQ page. OpenMW is an attempt to remake the Morrowind - brilliant role playing game. We're trying to remade Morrowind using open source tools and libraries. You won't need any Morrowind patches, because OpenMW will fix most common Morrowind engine bugs. It's worth to mention that OpenMW is open source Morrowind engine remake which allow much greater modability: change game rules, create new spell effects, etc. through scripting. With OpenMW you will be able to run Morrowind overhaul mods, texture replacers and much more like with original engine.